Multiple lines of evidence suggest global cooling

Another line of evidence that could suggest the planet is in a cooling trend comes from natural climate cycles.

A recent study by Dr. Roy Spencer from the University of Alabama, Huntsville found that about half the warming that occurred since the 1970s can be attributed to El Niño weather events which had a warming effect on the planet.

“As a result, because as much as 50 percent of the warming since the 1970s could be attributed to stronger El Niño activity, it suggests that the climate system is only about half as sensitive to increasing CO2 as previously believed,” Spencer said.

As The Daily Caller News Foundation previously reported, the Pacific Ocean’s natural warming and cooling cycles last about 30 years. La Niña cooling events were dominant from the 1950s to the 1970s, while El Niño warming events were dominant from the late 1970s to the late 1990s.

Spencer’s study suggests that the globe may be experiencing a cooling period — explaining the the lack of warming since 1998. There have been four La Niña years since 1998 and only two El Niño years.

“We are already in a cooling trend, which I think will continue for the next 15 years at least. There is no doubt the warming of the 1980s and 1990s has stopped,” said Professor Anastasios Tsonis of the University of Wisconsin.

In August, another study concluded that La Niña cooling activity was behind the 15-year pause in global warming.

“Our results show that the current hiatus [in global warming] is part of natural climate variability, tied specifically to a La-Niña-like decadal cooling,” reads the study by scientists Yu Kosaka and Shang-Ping Xie.

Scientists have been scrambling to explain the 15-year absence of global warming, with some arguing that the excess carbon dioxide has been stored in the world’s oceans. The U.N. climate authority, however, argued that a 15-year hiatus does not mean global warming has gone away as this time period is too short to come to any firm conclusions.

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